The NYFW Designers Redefining The All-American Aesthetic

Of September’s fashion weeks – seasonal celebrations of intricately crafted, astronomically expensive, and sometimes even politically potent dress – New York has long been renowned for hosting the industry’s commercial heavyweights: brands like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger have become synonymous with the fashion capital. Just a season after editors could hardly stop bemoaning the city’s lack of “Big Names”, the Big Apple’s Big Story has become a crop of young designers exploding industry standards of whiteness and thinness, being able-bodied and being cisgender.

With runways populated by models of various races, sizes, and gender identities, the shows of labels like No Sesso, Pyer Moss and Matthew Adams Dolan may hardly recall those of former NYFW mainstays. Nevertheless, it is what ultimately connects the nation’s new and old guard that reflects the significance of their differences: an ongoing inquiry into the look, the feeling, the incalculable value and, sometimes, terrible power held within the word, “American.” Only through appreciating this shared pursuit can one fully grasp what’s so radical about No Sesso’s inclusivity, what’s so revolutionary about Pyer Moss’ candour, what’s so redemptive about Matthew Adams Dolan’s reimaginings. Seventy-six years since the city’s first “Press Week,” a rising generation of tastemakers is poised to redefine the American aesthetic, and we at British Vogue are ready for it.

No Sesso

In a New York loft during the early 1990s, a bass-heavy Michael Kors show famously – and literally – brought the house down, sending flakes of plaster falling into Suzy Menkes’ iconic tuft. Almost 30 years later, on a February afternoon in 2019, a soft-spoken 29-year-old designer named Pierre Davis shattered a more figurative ceiling when she became the first black trans woman to present as part of the official CFDA schedule. Six months since their historic NYFW debut – a gender-bending spectacle of sumptuous velours, hulking patchwork coats, and a general mood of glamazon meets boss-bitch – the LA-based brand has the same perspective on their place in the industry as ever: No Sesso is a fashion label, not an activist organiation, or a LGBTQ-focused non-profit. Though their aim has never strayed from championing the beauty of their community – largely composed of queer and trans people of color – they remain steadfast in their view that to see No Sesso as just a queer brand is to overlook its arguably more subversive political contribution: “We just want to focus on the fashion,” says Arin Hayes, No Sesso’s creative director, “Here’s a black trans designer and a black queer brand trying to exist in the general fashion space; that's an act of resistance already.” And it is this experience of constant, embodied resistance that will constitute the subject of No Sesso’s upcoming, largely autobiographical collection, “I’d Rather Rescue Myself,” due to be presented at the start of the week.

Pyer Moss

Kerby Jean-Raymond founded Pyer Moss in 2013, the same year organisers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi posted the hashtag that grew into the international activist organisation, Black Lives Matter. Just over two years later and the synergy between the label and the movement would appear on a New York runway. Presented against the backdrop of a 12-minute documentary featuring the families of several black men lost to police brutality, Pyer Moss’ Spring 2016 Ready-to-Wear collection, “Double Bind,” metabolised the precarities of black American life into jackets splattered with symbolic blood and bandage-like neckpieces clearly meant to imbue the “choker” with an urgent political resonance. High-profile buyers almost immediately dropped the label, while right-wing death threats filled Jean-Raymond’s inboxes. Nevertheless, the designer maintained his label’s unabashedly political bent in the following years – a decision that deepened the label’s unflinchingly progressive reputation among influential devotees (including Lena Waithe, Colin Kaepernick, and Issa Rae), and contributed to Jean-Raymond’s winning the 2018 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award. Now, having not only invested the $400,000 prize back into Pyer Moss, but also taken a season off to hone his vision, Jean Raymond is equipped to take the next step toward realising his most ambitious goal of all: building his own holding company, an American answer to massive international luxury conglomerates such as LVMH. Ambitious? Not at all. As the designer told British Vogue of the plan earlier this year, “Why shouldn’t I?”

Matthew Adams Dolan

Born in Massachusetts, brought up in Sydney, educated in New York, rural Japan, and Lausanne, Switzerland, Matthew Adams Dolan does not – at least on paper – conjure the identity of a designer often associated with American country club cool. But the 31-year-old Parsons graduate is nevertheless as sensitive to the more traditional tenets of American dress as he is innovative when it comes to reimagining them. His Spring 2019 Ready-to-Wear collection, for instance, took the pastel suit into unfamiliar territory, subbing more familiar cuts and hues for kelp-greens, Dr. Seuss fuchsias, not to mention pants cut so thick either leg could serve as a couture sleeping bag. But Adams Dolan’s reboots operate not only on the level of sartorial play; in fact, the young designer’s most substantial substitution is not that of country club stuffiness for whimsy, but rather that of country club whiteness for diversity. “Even if you aren’t interested in fashion, you’ll have seen the idea of the American dream plastered across billboards,” Adams Dolan recently told British Vogue, “The idea of making that visual language more reflective of broader society – of real society – is a political comment in and of itself.”